Category: Brain Teaser

For years, one of the strangest traditions surrounding the NFL Draft had nothing to do with 40-yard dashes, bench presses, or vertical leaps. It was a timed intelligence test called the Wonderlic.

The Wonderlic Personnel Test was created in the 1930s and eventually became a staple of the NFL Combine. Prospects were given just 12 minutes to answer 50 questions covering logic, math, vocabulary, pattern recognition, and basic problem-solving. The idea was simple: teams wanted a quick snapshot of how fast a player could process information under pressure.

Some teams swore by it. Others thought it was mostly meaningless. Over the years, the test became legendary because of how wildly different the scores could be.

Quarterbacks were expected to score high because they have to read defenses, memorize playbooks, and make split-second decisions. Meanwhile, fans became obsessed with comparing scores from famous players. Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino reportedly scored a 15. Aaron Rodgers scored a 35. Ryan Fitzpatrick famously scored a near-perfect 48 out of 50 after graduating from Harvard.

Below is a sample Wonderlic-style test. Grab a timer if you want the authentic experience. Just don’t be too shocked if you start out feeling confident and end up staring blankly at fractions while muttering, “Wait… what?”

You have three jars, each labeled incorrectly:

1. Jar 1: Labeled “Red Jelly Beans”
2. Jar 2: Labeled “Blue Jelly Beans”
3. Jar 3: Labeled “Mixed Jelly Beans”

Each jar actually contains one of the following:

• Only red jelly beans.
• Only blue jelly beans.
• A mix of red and blue jelly beans.

Challenge:

Since all the labels are wrong, how many minimum jelly beans would you need to pull out to correctly identify what is in each jar and fix the labels?

Three guests check into a hotel room. The manager says the bill is $30, so each guest pays $10. Later the manager realizes the bill should only have been $25. To rectify this, he gives the bellhop $5 as five one-dollar bills to return to the guests.

On the way to the guests’ room to refund the money, the bellhop realizes that he cannot equally divide the five one-dollar bills among the three guests. As the guests are not aware of the total of the revised bill, the bellhop decides to just give each guest $1 back and keep $2 as a tip for himself, and proceeds to do so.

As each guest got $1 back, each guest only paid $9, bringing the total paid to $27. The bellhop kept $2, which when added to the $27, comes to $29. So if the guests originally handed over $30, what happened to the remaining $1?

(Answser Below)